Dolores R. and Kelly S. alerted us to Ellen Degeneres’ ridiculing of the new Bic product, “Bic for Her” (yes, a real product, if you hadn’t heard). Gentle but straight up, it’s worth four minutes of your time:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
A while back we featured a guest post by Geoffrey Arnold about discrimination against short men. He collects examples of heightism at his blog, The Social Complex, and has agreed to let us feature some of his examples here.
Think heightism doesn’t exist? Think again.
Bridesmaids include “Getting put with an usher who is not shorter than you” among good things in life (at 15secs):
Anne Hathaway takes her shoes off when standing next to a shorter guy (just the first 30secs):
Bravo TV executive Andy Cohen talks about being heckled backstage the 2011 Miss Universe pageant by Miss Montenegro and Miss Sri Lanka (unfortunately the clip ends with the host affirming Cohen that he’s not short instead of just condemning the contestants’ behavior):
Better to be tall: “Why be average, when you can XL”?
Short men are ridiculous and laughable, internationally.
American DirectTV commercial:
Chilean (I think) Doritos commercial:
Korean commercial:
American CRV commercial:
This ad, Arnold observes, actually “uses a statistic about heightism in order to justify and encourage the prejudice itself”:
See also Arnold’s guest posts introducing the concept of heightism as a gendered prejudice and discussing heightism (and other icky stuff) at Hooters.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Dolores R. sent in a cartoon by rampaige. It seems unlikely that a man would randomly criticize a woman in a scoop neck t-shirt for the existence of her breasts, but it happens more often than you think.
I’m a bit busty, and a girl, and strangers have occasionally given me “advice” about my breasts. Once I was told by a man I had just been introduced to that I shouldn’t wear sweaters. Stumped — and living in Wisconsin — I asked why. He explained that sweaters have “pile,” by which he meant that the fabric was thick. The thickness of the fabric, he said, made my boobs look even bigger. Since that was a bad thing, apparently, he advised me to avoid sweaters. Weird, I know. But I’m just saying, this stuff happens.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Sociological Images owes a great debt to Jean Kilbourne, a pioneer in the feminist critique of advertising. She’s most famous, probably, for her video series, Killing Us Softly.
In those videos, she offers a typology of ways that women are subordinated in media content. One of those is silencing. Sometimes this means actually covering a woman’s mouth (forcibly, but also playfully), other times copy simply says that she need not (or shouldn’t) speak. Below are a series of images we’ve collected that illustrate this. Some of them are dated, but they give you an idea of what the mechanism of silencing looks like.
Canada’s Next Top Model (Cycle 3), sent along by Julie C., included a photoshoot in which the models’ mouths were covered with duct tape.
Erin S. sent in a link to a set of fashion photos in New York Magazine that show faceless women.
Reanimated Horse sent us an American Apparel ad in which the woman’s body is highlighted but her face is obscured:
The next two ads are examples of one’s that suggest that women need not speak, that products can speak for them.
“Eye contact is speaking without words”:
“Make a statement without saying a word”:
Finally, Sarah B. sent along a form of resistance to these kinds of images. Colin von Heuring, who just started a brand new blog on media subversion, saw an ad with the copy “You don’t need words to make a statement.” He decided to “ma[k]e it explicit” (original on the left, modified on the right):
For more on Jean Kilbourne and the subordination of women in advertising, here’s the trailer to Killing Us Softly 4:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Hanna Rosin, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The End of Men, has written a piece about hook up culture on and off college campuses for the September issue of her magazine. Given that I’ve done some research on hook up culture, W.W. Norton’s Karl Bakeman asked me to weigh in. So, here are my two cents: Rosin isn’t wrong to argue that the culture offers women sexual opportunities and independence, but she mischaracterizes the objections to hook up culture and draws too rosy a conclusion.
Those who wring their hands and “lament” hook up culture, Rosin contends, do so because they think women are giving it up too easily, a practice that will inevitably leave them heartbroken.`She writes:
[Critics of hook up culture pine] for an earlier time, when fathers protected “innocent” girls from “punks” and predators, and when girls understood it was their role to also protect themselves.
If this is the problem, the answer is less sex and more (sexless?) relationships. But, Rosin rightly argues, this wrongly stereotypes women as fragile flowers whose self-esteem lies between their legs. It also romanticizes relationships. Drawing on the fantastic research of sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong, she explains that young women often find serious relationships with men to be distracting; staying single (and hooking up for fun) is one way to protect their own educational and career paths.
All this is true and so, Rosin concludes, hook up culture is “an engine of female progress — one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.”
Well, not exactly. Yes, women get to choose to have sex with men casually and many do. And some women truly enjoy hook up culture, while others who like it less still learn a lot about themselves and feel grateful for the experiences. I make this argument with my colleague, Caroline Heldman, in Hooking Up and Opting Out: Negotiating Sex in the First Year of College.
But what young women don’t control is the context in which they have sex. The problem with hook up culture is not casual sex, nor is it the fact that some women are choosing it, it’s the sexism that encourages men to treat women like pawns and requires women to be just as cunning and manipulative if they want to be in the game; it’s the relentless pressure to be hot that makes some women feel like shit all the time and the rest feel like shit some of the time; it’s the heterosexism that marginalizes and excludes true experimentation with same-sex desire; and it’s the intolerance towards people who would rather be in relationships or practice abstinence (considered boring, pathetic, or weird by many advocates of hook up culture including, perhaps, Rosin).
Fundamentally, what’s wrong with hook up culture is the antagonistic, competitive, malevolent attitude towards one’s sexual partners. College students largely aren’t experimenting with sexuality nicely. Hook ups aren’t, on the whole, mutually satisfying, strongly consensual, experimental affairs during which both partners express concern for the others’ pleasure. They’re repetitive, awkward, and confusing sexual encounters in which men have orgasms more than twice as often as women:
The problem with hook up culture, then, is not that people are friends with benefits. It’s that they’re not. As one of my students concluded about one of her hook up partners: “You could have labeled it friends with benefits… without the friendship maybe?”
Hook up culture is an “engine of female progress” only if we take-for-granted that our destination is a caricature of male sexuality, one in which sex is a game with a winner and a loser. But do we really want sex to be competitive? Is “keep[ing] pace with the boys,” as Rosin puts it, really what liberation looks like? I think we can do better.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
We have a fun post about the various ways in which Prince Charles was posed with Princess Diana in order to obscure the fact that she was about his height. Building on this, Geoffrey Arnold at The Social Complex has collected some examples of men’s height being manipulated in order to preserve the social illusion that men are taller (or at least not shorter) than women.
See also Arnold’s guest posts introducing the concept of heightism as a gendered prejudice and discussing heightism (and other icky stuff) at Hooters.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
In Gay Rights at the Ballot Box, I analyze the long history of transgender smear tactics used by the Religious Right, a large social movement that opposes LGBT rights. One area where this occurs is the production of campaign ads addressing attempts to protect transgender individuals from discrimination. The ads almost always focus on either children or bathrooms.
Back in April, voters in Anchorage, Alaska, rejected Proposition 5, which would have created a law protecting residents from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Such laws are primarily to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) residents. Transgender inclusion in the potential law was the focus of two commercials by the organization Protect Your Rights.
In both of these political ads, figures of large, hairy male-bodied individuals in dresses, described as “transvestites”, represented transgender inclusion. They present transgender individuals as grotesque and threatening. At the heart of these ads and other transgender smear tactics is anxiety about bodies in gender-segregated spaces that are typically occupied by women.
The women’s bathroom in particular is a site where gender conformity is policed. According to scholar Judith Halberstam in her book Female Masculinity, women’s bathrooms “operate as an arena for the enforcement of gender conformity…a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a ‘little girl’s room’ to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair” (p. 24). In this ad, the locker room operates in parallel way, as a space where gender conformity and bodies are strictly policed:
The other ad focused on the possibility of a “transvestite” getting hired at a daycare facility:
In addition to the use of stereotypically-presented “transvestites” to represent all transgender individuals as grotesque and laughable, the ads also argue that employers should have the right to discriminate if they think their customers are prejudiced toward a particular group or uncomfortable with them in certain jobs — an argument that has been used to resist allowing racial minorities and women into various careers. The ads also suggest that Anchorage is already sufficiently tolerant and thus doesn’t need to address the issues Proposition 5 supporters claimed were a problem.
Ads that raise fears about transvestites teaching in the classroom have been used since the 1970s during ballot measure campaigns, and the Religious Right has been raising concerns about transgender women in women’s bathrooms since the late 1980s. These two ads from the Anchorage Proposition 5 campaign are among the newest additions to the long tradition of ads that rely on stereotypes of LGBT individuals as predatory, dangerous to have around children, and having ulterior motives.
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Amy L. Stone is an associate professor of sociology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
First the marketing team for an energy drink out of Poland, called “Black,” hired a Black person, Mike Tyson, to personify its product. Then, they surround him with White, female models and have the convicted rapist call himself a “beast” that can’t control himself. Tag lines include “that’s the power of Black” and “Black power.”
So we have, in one ad campaign, the fetishization of Black men, the White supremacist portrayal of White women as the ultimate female, their objectification (see #3, he actually hands one out in the second ad), the trivialization of his crime (he can’t control himself, LOL right!?), the use of animalistic language to refer to Black people, and the appropriation of the Black Power movement. Anyone see anything else? Does it matter that this comes out of Poland and not the U.S.?
Thanks to Tom Megginson at Work That Matters for the heads up.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
